Underground Aids War Raging

COMMENTARY

August 22, 1987|By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, Universal Press Syndicate

Here is the quarrel going on, much of it beneath the surface, having to do with the epidemic AIDS.

1. At first, the disease was isolated as having two highly identifiable target groups, male homosexuals and intravenous drug users. Publicity was given to the dangers of certain kinds of sex and to the use of needles that might be contaminated. The result of this publicity has not, according to preliminary evidence, done a great deal to slow down dirty-needle use, this being in part because the drug culture tends to hypnotize users against collateral dangers. The homosexual community, on the other hand, has made considerable strides in self-regulation. The bathhouses in San Francisco, for instance, are closed down, and whereas the infected population was doubling every 12 months, as of one year ago that period appears to have stretched to 20 months -- a step, at least, in the right direction.

2. But along the way, the fear of the disease and its increasing incidence among women and children gave rise to the assumption that for all intents and purposes it is and should be considered to be a general epidemic, from which only the monogamous, non-drug-using, non-hospital-working minority were entirely safe. Although one cannot and should not endeavor to conclude that these general fire alarms were cynical, it is true that they served particular purposes.

One such purpose, obviously, is the call for federal funding. There are those (I am one of them) who believe the federal government is properly called upon to fund research for any disease, no matter how particularized its victims. If an epidemic were to break out that afflicted only Scandinavian sun-worshipers, remedies are properly investigated by government funding. But it is correct that much of the public takes the position that if homosexuals desire to continue to live promiscuously, then they should suffer the consequences of doing so, and that if drug users persist in using dirty needles, let them die a dirty death. Accordingly, it was in the political interest of the two standard victim-groups to universalize AIDS -- AIDS will get YOU if you don`t watch out.

A second reason for considering the virus to be universal had to do with the desire of the victim groups to make themselves anonymous. When a death occurs among young or middle-aged men, and AIDS is given as the cause of death, the public presumption has been that the deceased was an active homosexual or else a drug user. Although cultural vectors lighten progressively the invidious overhead of homosexual activity, still it would soothe many who live under tension to accept an AIDS death as saying nothing about the sexual life of the deceased.

3. But there is recent evidence that the disease continues to be highly discriminatory. Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times, a supercharged reporter normally associated with left causes, has written a widely unnoticed series, accumulating evidence the burden of which is that heterosexual transmission of AIDS is very, very rare in the United States. Other not widely noticed scientific groups have come to the same conclusions. They don`t tell heterosexual couples to take no precautions, but attempt to assure them the chances of their contracting the disease are slight. The burden of which is to ease a little of the pressure on the panic button, the highest pitch of which was reached by Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard when he wrote a few months ago that the way things were looking, it was possible that before a cure or a vaccine was developed, 25 percent of the human race might have died from AIDS.

4. But whatever Scheer`s findings, there is no gainsaying the fact of diseased children being born, and destined to live only five, six, seven years. These are the congenital AIDS victims. And since there is no retroactive way to relieve the child`s parents of the disease, necessarily one depends on research of a kind that can actually treat the disease, since prophylactics are hardly usable on diseased fetuses.

Research, then, will continue. But apparently evidence mounts that the victim groups of yesterday are the likely victim groups of tomorrow.